Our coffee, bean to cup
Who grows it, who roasts it, and why your flat white tastes the same on a Tuesday as it does on a Saturday.
We are a café first. Before there was a dinner menu there was an espresso machine, and the coffee is still the thing we are fussiest about. People ask what is in the house blend and why the cold brew takes so long, so here is the whole story.
The farms
Our house blend is two coffees. About 60% comes from a cooperative of small farms in Minas Gerais, Brazil, and gives the chocolate and nutty body you taste through milk. The other 40% is a washed coffee from Sidama in Ethiopia, which adds a little brightness, like stone fruit, so the flat white is not flat at all.
We change the Ethiopian lot when the new harvest lands, usually around March, and taste every sample side by side before we switch.
The roast
We do not roast ourselves. Our beans come from a small roastery across town: five people and one very loud machine. They roast for us every Monday and Thursday, a medium roast made for milk, and deliver the next morning. We then rest the beans for about five days before they go near the grinder. Freshly roasted coffee is full of gas and tastes sharp and uneven until it settles.
The morning dial-in
Coffee changes every day with the humidity, the age of the beans and how hard the grinder has been working. So the first job each morning, before the doors open at eight, is to "dial in": pull shots, weigh them, taste them, and adjust the grind until the recipe is right. Ours is:
- 18 grams of ground coffee in,
- 36 grams of espresso out,
- in 27 to 31 seconds.
If a shot runs outside that window, it goes down the sink. We would rather pour away twenty shots at half past seven than serve one bad one at nine.
Milk, sugar and the long wait
We steam every milk to about 60°C: hot enough to taste sweet, cool enough to drink straight away. Oat and almond cost a little more because they cost us more, not to make a point. The Iced Gula Melaka Latte uses a syrup we cook in the kitchen from blocks of palm sugar, and the Cold Brew steeps in cold water for 18 hours, which is why it tastes smooth and never bitter.
If you ever get a coffee you do not love, tell us. We will make it again, and we will want to know why.
